On ‘Piers Morgan Uncensored,’ the Iran Crisis, Strait of Hormuz and US political fallout with Glenn Greenwald, Cenk Uygur, Jillian Michaels, and Ronna McDaniel:

PIERS MORGAN: Glenn, welcome back to you. Always great to have you as well on Uncensored. You know, President Trump is back to putting memes out, you know, Cargill and being blown to smithereens, all this kind of stuff. I think people have sadly stopped listening or taking much notice of these constant outpourings by Trump about the state of this war because nothing he posts seems to bear much relation to the reality on the ground. But this theory, which is being put out by people like Brett McGurk, that actually it is not been a long time historically, this war so far, much longer than we were told it would be, but still historically a relatively short period of time and that the constant economic pressure could ultimately force Iran to the table sooner rather later. What do you think of that? GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, it just strikes me that sometimes I think we lose sight of how absurd all of these rationales are. The, you know, Julian started by saying, oh, I thought the war was going to be a lot shorter than it ended up being. You know, with respect, like how many times are people going to fall for that? You know, we were told that we would be able to take out Saddam and put in the government that we wanted and achieve our objectives in Iraq in a minute, maximum two to three months. Rumsfeld once said maybe six months out the outside and 10 years later, we were still there. Same in Afghanistan, it’d be easy to take out the Taliban when we were there for 20 years. We left and the Taliban marched right in as if none of it ever happened. How many times are we going to fall for the same propaganda? Same with the idea that Iran is an existential threat to the United States. This is all the same stuff we heard about Iraq. They’re on the market for nuclear weapons. They’re building WMDs. They’re an existential threat. They’re terrorizing their own people. We’re going to liberate. It’s the same playbook over and over and it never works. So now you have this alternative theory that never existed at the start of the war. There was never any war goal enunciated at the start of the war that we were going to create an alternative channel in the Strait of Hormuz to take out Iran’s leverage. This was never mentioned as a war aim. This is something that desperate people do when they’re hoping to grab something in the dark that justifies this incredibly dangerous war that they started for no real clear reason. The reality is we didn’t need to remove the leverage of Iran with the Strait of Hormuz when this war started because the Strait of Hormuz had always been open. So we have now like a war that has to go on. People have to die. We have to spend enormous sums of money. We have to further deplete our stockpiles which are already depleted, ruin our credibility on the world stage to solve a problem that never existed until the war started in the first place that the war itself created. And I just want to add one last point, which is yes, there is leverage that Iran has for the Strait of Hormuz, but it is not the only leverage. It’s not even the most significant leverage that they have. The most significant leverage that they have is that they have proven they can easily destroy huge amounts of energy infrastructure in what we call our Persian Gold Ally States, which are actually dictatorships. And they have been imposing and continue to impose large-scale damage on American military bases throughout the region. We don’t hear much about it because those military bases are in dictatorships, which are our allies, and they don’t permit much news to get out about it. But we know for certain that serious damage has been inflicted, probably deaths in American service members over the last couple of days, on these bases in the Middle East. And if they really wanted to, they could destroy the energy infrastructure on which the world depends in the Middle East, and then you would see real-scale, genuine economic collapse with oil reserves depleting and the like. We’re playing a very dangerous game, and for what?

RealClearPolitics Videos